Israel to PA donor countries: Lean on Abbas to end terror
Foreign Ministry slams UNRWA as Palestinian ‘mouthpiece’
The Foreign Ministry is urging donor countries to the PA “to use their influence to effect a cessation in violence and incitement by the Palestinian Authority,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said on Tuesday.
“The blood of Israeli citizens is on the hands of [PA President] Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues, who are inciting children to commit murder,” she said. Hotovely cited Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh as “praising and glorifying a 13-year-old Palestinian who set out with a butcher knife to murder Israeli children in a candy shop.” She was referring to Monday’s attack in the capital’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood.
Noting that the PA has turned into an “incubator for fanatic terrorism,” she said that Israel should consider halting its monthly financial transfers to the PA. Israel has taken this step in the past, only to reinstate the tax transfers under international pressure.
In a related development, the Foreign Ministry slammed the United Nations Relief Works Agency on Tuesday for turning into an operative for the Palestinians.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon said that a communique on the recent wave of attacks released by UNRWA on Monday was a “one-sided, anti-Israeli” statement that “completely and absurdly ignores the Palestinian wave of terrorism and attacks on Israeli citizens.”
The UNRWA, Nachshon said, has abandoned its mission and, “not for the first time, turned itself into a political mouthpiece and pawn to serve the Palestinians.”
The UNRWA statement said the organization was “deeply alarmed by the escalating violence and widespread loss of civilian life in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in Israel.”
The statement gave a tally of the number of Palestinians in Gaza killed and injured in recent days, and said there were 45 incursions by Israeli forces into refugee camps in the West Bank from October 1 to 9 that resulted in “several refugees being shot dead, including one child.”
The statement condemned “killing and injuring of Palestinian refugees,” but said nothing of Israeli victims.
“Further to the recent statement of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the high number of casualties, in particular those resulting from the use of live ammunition by Israeli forces, raises serious concerns about the excessive use of force that may be contrary to international law enforcement standards,” the statement said.